I like this recipe. I personally wouldn't use special roast and extrea special, but what they hey? Why not? I think sour and smoke tend to compliment each other more than some would think. Take Gratzer for example: 100% smoked wheat with lacto. It is awesome. I say brew forward!

As far as my comment regarding smokey sours as novel, I only mean that I have searched for commercial examples for some time and the few I have seen are no distributed where I live, so I want to take a shot at it myself. I'll toss some oats in for body, vary the caramel malts for sweetness and still add the syrup for flavor. It should come out somewhere in the middle.

Regarding hops, I understand that sour+bitter is not a happy combo (save Bitter Monk from Anchorage, which seems to have been the only brew to pull it off), which is why I scaled down the IBUs as it was and kept all hop additions toward the end of the boil for primarily flavor and secondarily hop aroma (which I am aware will fade given the time it takes to sour). But I am still unclear as to the dynamics of IBUs and non-sacchyromyces. Is it just lacto that gets zapped by IBUs or does that carry over to pedio or even brett? I would assume that brett is relatively unaffected, whereas the true bugs would have a hard/impossible time coping.

It doesn't effect brett and, as for lacto, it varies depending on the strain but both should both be just fine with the hopping in this recipe. I've done a number of sour farmhouse ales with ibu's in the mid 20's that developed plenty of lactic sourness.

Bitter and sour don't generally go together but it depends on how bitter, how sour, and how sweet. It's about balance and that's why I earlier suggested that he cut the ibu's to the mid 20's and up the crystal.

Smoked beers mellow quite it bit over time and I'd think over 12-18 month it would smooth out quite a bit. You could initially go light on the smoke malt and always blend a stander smoked porter back adding both smoke and sweet. Just a thought and I never tried it with a sour beer but it worked well with a barrel aged smoked porter. With bugs you might need to keg or flash pasteurizes the bottles.

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I absolutely love sours... but I am still grasping how to make one myself. My wife and I both seek out Flanders Reds and the like all the time, so we wanted to figure out a good "house sour" to make over and over again. I thought of taking a little departure from the norm and try to put a mild twist on the traditional sour guidelines and base the recipe in the robust porter neighborhood, but I am wondering if my desire for a little originality is really just going to be an Oud Bruin (which is not a bad thing if it does!).

A few questions:
1) What do you think of this amount of smoked malt with the wild flavors?
2) I am really unclear about IBUs and wild yeast/bugs--some recipes are under 10 for the lacto, some are 40+ without problems... how should I understand IBUs and wild fermentation activity, and what to look for without killing off all of the bacteria?